Tartarin,
The U.S. is widely criticized by others for its large income disparity. It is indeed appropriate to point out that the bottom here (on average) does better than the bottoms among these critics. It is also useful to understand this fact in evaluating our own situation and in evaluating the merit (or lack of it) in alternate policies. These statistics do not mean much to one who is in the grip of poverty, but they mean a great deal to those evaluating policy alternatives. As we have seen in the past century Socialism was widely touted as the solution to both poverty and inequity. As the world soon discovered, the power to control the distribution of wealth utterly corrupted the governments that tried it, often leading to terrible oppression - usually in the name of social justice. Moreover after a few decades the result was usually uniform poverty for all but the governing elite.
Unemployment in the U.S. is less than in any Western European country. We are recovering from an economic bubble with milder recessionary effects than in any comparable event this century. These facts do matter and they do figure in any right understanding of the present situation.
Try a little Italian bread with some good olive oil and red wine. It will improve your disposition among other things. (Goes well with Yeats too.)
Blatham,
Sorry for the misread. No columns of any type. However if I had one it would be Corinthian. I read the NYT article. Of course poverty is greater now than two years ago. We are emerging from a recession. Selective reporting of statistics can amount to deliberate deception - a common NYT tactic.
Lola,
We agree on all but one point. I just don't see 'them' as the formidable danger that you see. I hope I am right.
Lots of Jews where I grew up. They frankly seemed less alien to us than the Protestant majority. As a young boy I was accustomed to sneaking my Jewish pals into the CYO gym/rec center under fake (usually Irish) names. Later when the CYO was closed down for repairs they reciprocated by faking my registration in the JCC, under the name of Alan Weiss. We had to endure about 30 minutes of instruction in Hebrew before the basketball and swimming, but for a Catholic altar boy it didn't seem very strange - though the sounds were more guttural than the Latin. It all came to an end a month or so later when the Weiss family didn't pay the bill (they kept better records) and my mother found the mezuzah I wore there in place of the customary scapular.
Later I learned there was another benefit. Nice Jewish girls with wild oats to sow would NEVER do it with Jewish boys. We were the lucky recipients. (However we had to listen to a lot of talk from the Jewish guys about shicksas.)
"...the power to control the distribution of wealth utterly corrupted the governments that tried it, often leading to terrible oppression - usually in the name of social justice..."
Two questions looking for George's answer here:
1) Do you think the gap between rich and poor in the US is too great and should be minimized?
2) If so, how would YOU do it?
And a third one, to accompany your wine and dipped bread:
3) In the "developed" countries which have a smaller gap between rich and poor, have you found oppression and injustice?
Tartarin,
Your answers,
I would consider some means to reduce the gap, but would be very concerned to ensure that the remedy did not reduce the incentives for productive economic activity on the part of people at the top or bottom of the distribution. We do have far greater social and economic mobility in this country than the countries usually compared with us, and I would not want to diminish that by either confiscatory taxes at the top end or enervating subsidies at the bottom.
I do regard the social security system as a tax and not an earnings set aside as often is stated. With that viewpoint, I consider the Social Security tax to be regressive and would be pleased to see it folded into the general income tax with its far more progressive character. At the same time I also favor the replacement of part of it with a system based on income deferral and private investment and ownership for individual contributors.
I don't see any widespread oppression and injustice among the principal countries usually held up for comparison to us - principally the Scandinavian countries. The mild socialism practiced there has been free of the worst excesses it has yielded in other places. I suspect this is in part a result of the more monolithic character of the cultures in these countries. I see France, Germany particularly and other Old European countries as well, as approaching a demographic and economic disaster if they do not soon begin to dismantle government ownership of economic activities and the excesses of their social welfare systems. I would not wish their future prospects on us.
George,
Humans will whine under any condistions. I see some alarming trends in regard to US wealth distribution but hearing Americans complain about the gap sounds odd to me. I don't think they have experienced a real gap.
Italian bread, good olive oil and red wine sound heavenly!
I agree, sigh, once again, that the fundamentalist right is a very serious danger. I didn't state that we shouldn't be aware of their inroads or object strongly, but that by vilifying them other, less radical rightists, might feel forced to side with the right in simple defensiveness. The human tendency is to be loyal, especially when someone from the 'other' side is pointing out their worst failings with hatred, which is what so many Democrats are doing--here and in the media. It becomes a very satisfying form of communication to sit around naming each nasty element of those we dislike. It becomes too easy to let that dislike turn into hatred. The other side is very aware of that hatred and becomes even more entrenched.
Christianity in the form of the Episcopal church needed peace-deepers to protect the gay priest from other Episcopalians. The Quackers, as close to true Chrisians as any I've known, offered to be the peace keepers.
Doctors have been murdered by some good Christian pro-choice people because they preformed abortions.
Christians can be dangerous--we need to protect ourselves from them, particularly the religious fundamentalists.
Is civility absolutely out of the question? Should we pay more attention to those who are using the fundamentalists for their own goals?
I think if civility has gone by the wayside, then I no longer fit into this society.
If we don't spend most of our time working toward removing those who are truly running the country, the fundamentalists will continue to gain power.
Diane wrote:Christians can be dangerous--we need to protect ourselves from them, particularly the religious fundamentalists.
Is anyone else on your 'dangerous' list Diane?
What forms of protection do you advocate?
I'll take the Quakers any day.
Quote:Selective reporting of statistics can amount to deliberate deception - a common NYT tactic.
george
Every now and again you say something really stupid. You probably DO have a big fat ionic column smack in your living room.
Blatham,
Did I say "ionic"? Damn.
I do observe some fairly regular. selective reporting of statistics in the venerated NYT. I get the drift that perhaps you don't agree.
Although I don't wholly agree with you, George, I think we mostly do agree on those points. Where I stumble (not in your post, I mean in general) is on the shrugging off of the excesses of capitalism and the horror with which the very notion of socialism is greeted. What we need to learn in this country is that too much of a good thing is a bad thing, whether in our diets (yes, being a southern Spaniard, I love bread, o oil and vino too, but in moderation, of course!!), or in our politics. In the view of many here, capitalism has over-reached and needs to be tempered with what you'd call socialism. If we've learned anything in the past 50 years or so, it's that the incentives of capitalism, the safety net of socialism, and the guarantee of an open society are the best combination we've come up with so far. When we have (as I believe we have now) a rush towards capitalism run amok, a tendency to trade openness for ephemeral "security," and a running down of social programs which, if not perfect, have formed part of the general prosperity and justice of our society, then we're in trouble.
We're in trouble, that's for sure.
Tartarin,
I generally agree with your prescription for capitalism moderated with social safety nets. Yes, an open, adaptive society, pragmatic in its approach to problems, with a strong bias towards individual freedoms is best.
I don't agree that we are in trouble though. On the whole we are in much better shape than any of the other G-8 economies, both from a strictly economic perspective and (in my view) from social and political perspectives as well.
Where in southern Spain? I spent a delightful summer once in a very out of the way spot, Arcos de la F...Much enjoyed travels to Madrid, Seville, & Barcelona. Even liked Valencia, Grenada, and Malaga, but found Torremolinos ghastly.
I prefer a good rare steak and white wine.................Cake Bread or a good Sancerre..........to replace the Chianti and fava beans................and a cigar of magnificient proportions
I have sent an email requesting the stats on the Radical Religious Right.
George -- I've stopped reading your posts when you fall back on comparisons with the G8 or equivalent. Not because I disagree with you about the comparison (and I do) but because the whole point is to compare the US with what the US presents itself as and with what it has the potential to be. I think the problem starts with your belief that we're not in trouble: you are seeking every possible way of avoiding trouble.
We are an enormously prosperous country and still healthy enough to be capable of doing so much more than we are doing to improve our own lives and the lives of others on the planet. As long as we play the "trickle down" game which is so popular with those who do the trickling and so devastating to those at the other end, we are messing with our potential. The signs are all there: a society in which education doesn't even have second place in the distribution of resources; a health care system which creates enormous profits for the providers and which doesn't adequately cover any except those at the top; a military and intelligence capability which has just proven its incompetence (and corruption); a confused and hypocritical immigration policy; an enormous and profitable entertainment industry which relies on increasing violence to sell its goods; a careless alienation from the environment and production of food which makes up for the decline of natural nutrients with the addition of chemicals; a cavalier attitude towards water resources and their exploitation; a huge increase in asthma and other lung diseases due to unregulated air pollution; the dependence of transportation and industrial production on a fuel which is gradually being depleted and whose use makes us increasingly likely to invade other countries preemptively, with whatever invented pretext; the replacement of law and moral precepts with ignorant religiosity, led by unscrupulous, greedy prophets who increasingly have the support of all three branches of our government; a gradual narrowing of information sources into a few channels whose purpose is not to inform but to persuade and sell....
On another thread I posted an op-ed piece from today's NY Times about the lastest efforts by the fundies to stop research into (among other things) HIV.
New Blacklist
george
re your NY Times bit...we both know you were doing the 'liberal media bias' ad hominem generality.
craven says something interesting
Quote:Humans will whine under any condistions. I see some alarming trends in regard to US wealth distribution but hearing Americans complain about the gap sounds odd to me. I don't think they have experienced a real gap.
By 'real gap', I suspect he refers to conditions elsewhere, where extremes of wealth and poverty exist. It would be true to say that the US doesn't reflect such disparity. But how much is too much? And why would we hold that disparity is or might be a wrong at all? How close to crossing some line are we?
Or craven might be pointing to the terrible poverty of some parts of the world, a situation not reflected in North America. So why are WE whining? I happen to agree with part of this view (even if it's a mis-statement of craven's point)...the distance between 'want' and 'need' in our culture is probably morally inexcuseable given the situation of so much of the rest of the world, and given that the planet is a closed system with finite resources and finite ecological limits.
george agrees with some arrangement of social safety nets. It would be interesting to flesh out what he means and why he holds this view. But maybe a different thread might be best for that, if I get time.
hobit
Yes...good link! That is just one of very many similar such strategies and targets. These guys ARE organized. We really ought to have a thread set aside, as an archive, to note each of these instances as we bump into them. I'll start one now, under politics.
As part of the new project, "Whose Democracy Is It?", the Diane Rehm show this morning had an hour's worth of very useful discussion about voting and about the reliability of electronic voting machines. Among others, David Dill of Stanford was on the panel -- he's the guy who's been studying these machines and believes we're in for trouble. Highly recommended listen for those interested in the prospect of escalating corruption of the voting system. The audio is usually posted in late afternoon.
http://www.wamu.org/dr/
See also:
http://www.whosedemocracy.org/
